Smoke in Your Eyes and Butter in Your Hair

View of a dammed river from EA flight to Axum

 Rather than slog two days on a succession of minibuses, Ari, Oscar, and I flew on Ethiopian Airlines to Axum.  I am a fan of this airline, which covers Ethiopia's major cities and tourist attractions by flying Bombardier twin propeller planes in circular routes.  For example, our flight attendant's daily route is Addis to Gondar to Lalibela to Axum to Gondar to Addis.  The plane takes off, you check out the scenery while sipping a warm Pepsi, and then the plane lands.  These are quick flights into small airports.
Yet, you still must budget a lot of time to negotiate security (the same woman picked my backpack apart completely - twice) and any other ticket line or airport service you may use.  These things take time, so much more time than this gringo is used to.  But it certainly doesn't take two days by minibus, so I'll take it.  By the way, I've been called a gringo twice here in Ethiopia; once it was meant to sting, the second time it was just a descriptor.  How did that word get here anyway?

Fallen stelae, Ax

 Axum today is a dusty, small town though it's growing.  You can tell it's growing because there are piles of road materials and cobblestones blocking the sidewalk up and down the main drag.  It used to be the capital of the Axumite Empire, up until the 7th century or so.  This empire was no joke, it stretched up into Sudan, to the Red Sea, across the Suez to southern Yemen and most, if not all, of present day Ethiopia.  Pretty big for a sophisticated, well developed trading empire that most of us "educated" westerners have never heard of.  Lasting from about 400 BC until the growth of Islam all around isolated the now Christian society, the Axumite kingdom marked tombs with stelae and obelisks, many of which dot the area today. The tallest of these is 33 meters tall.  It fell and broke.  But there is another that is 22m and a replica of one that is 27m tall.  That last one is a matter of contention; the Italians uprooted it and plopped it down in Rome in the '30s.  They agreed to return it in a treaty, but still haven't.

After walking around in the heat and viewing empty tombs and obelisks, I quickly started having flashbacks to my Egyptian monument fatigue.  No more tombs for me.  I need a long break from the rooms of the dead, though they are a handy place to escape the mid-day sun.  You can take day trips around the Axum area and view monasteries improbably set on top of mountains, but I'm done with monasteries as well, and the monasteries here very often don't allow women anyway.  So why spend $80 to rent a 4WD and a driver to check that out?  I let Ari and Oscar explore the environs while I took a cafe day.  Drinking macchiatos and mixed mango and avocado juices can occupy me for hours, as can brushing the flies off my shoulders and out of my ears.

Handicrafts for sale, Axum

 Before I managed to write off Axum's monuments entirely, we met a lovely Ethiopian girl, Zabeeb.  Zabeeb is living in Axum and working for the Chinese road crew; she translates what the Chinese management tell her in English to the Ethiopian workers who speak Amharic or Tigrinya.  Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, but plenty of Ethiopians from the 81 or so tribes in the country don't speak it.  Tigrinya is the official language of Eritrea, whose border is very close to Axum, and it's the common language in this part of Ethiopia.  Zabeeb offered to show us around and cook for us, an idea we predictably adored.  For my part, I was more excited about the food than the sightseeing.  But it was Saturday, market day, so she took us through the whole thing - from the frankincense that women throw on the charcoal fire to make the house smell nice to the injera mill to the livestock market that would make a PETA member would sputter in rage.  I tried a delicious new fruit, kasmir, the English name of which I don't know but it might be a custard apple, and I picked up a traditional beauty tip.

Injera stones for sale, Axum

 Zabeeb pointed out a woman sitting on the ground against the wall.  In her hands was a gourd.  Inside the gourd, water and what looked like large lumps of very soft and creamy cheese.  Zabeeb described it as "butter" and told me that you rub it in your hair, leave it on for hours, preferably overnight, and then shower and shampoo it out.  It's supposed to be good for your hair and moisturizing for your skin as the water carries it down your body.  It smelled like very grassy, herbal butter, which is probably what it is.  And for five birr, I was going to try it!  So the gringos purchased their hair treatment, and then we headed to Zabeeb's for lunch.

Livestock market, Axum

 Lunch was delicious, entertaining, and eye-opening.  Zabeeb has unofficially adopted two girls, 15 and 16 years old.  Zabeeb herself is only 22, so they are more like younger sisters than daughters.  The girls had set up a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony which we watched after our lunch.  Watching Zabeeb and the girls make lunch was interesting, if only to see how manual the stove is.  The typical Ethiopian home has a small charcoal brazier that holds one pot at a time.  You place charcoal briquettes on top and the kettle or pot rests on them.  If you want high heat, someone squats in front of the brazier and fans it, increasing the oxygen to the briquettes, for as long as you want that higher heat level.  What strikes me about the way I live back home is not just the luxuries I take for granted, but the labor saved from the most mundane of tasks.  There are lots of reasons American women work outside the home, but one of them surely is that we have cooking heat at the turn of a knob needing neither firewood collection nor grass fans to act as a bellows.  How many cups of tea would you offer a visitor if you had to fan the flames to boil the parasites out of the untreated water anyway?  A corollary of this is that I'm not as good at improvising something out of nothing as the majority of the rest of the world.  Zabeeb doesn't have a potholder, or not that I saw, but she has the smarts to fold up the outer leaf from a head of cabbage and pick up the hot lid with that.

Grinding the coffee at a coffee ceremony

After a fantastic lunch full of vegetables and tella, homemade beer, it was time for the coffee ceremony.  Set in the middle of the room were fronds from trees in a circle.  On top of that, the cups, the stove, the unroasted coffee, a few tools, and, popcorn.  First, the coffee is washed in several rinses of water and some frankincense is thrown on the fire to set the mood.  Then, the coffee is roasted by hand - it's held over the fire in a small, long-handled pot and constantly shaken so that it doensn't burn.  Once it's roasted and the room is smoky, the coffee gets a rest and the popcorn gets popped.  Once the popcorn is done and it's had a quick pass around the room, the water gets boiled.  This and the coffee are combined in a narrow-necked heat proof bottle, from which the brewed coffee is poured into cups and served.  I take this with sugar because it's potent and thick, though very good.  Tradition says you are to take three cups of coffee at a ceremony; I hit my limit at two.

Stelae field, Axum

Our day with Zabeeb and her girls was pretty dang good, even if we did later walk around town with hardened butter in our hair.  I believe I addressed in my last post my declining standards of vanity, but I didn't think it would come to a new low so soon after typing the words.  No one seemed to pay any mind, and once I showered according to Zabeeb's instructions - stand under the hot water for a few minutes to let the butter move out of your hair and over your skin, then shampoo twice - I did have some very soft and yet ungreasy hair.  Do not try this at home though; I'm pretty sure it only works with Ethiopian butter.  In fact, this prized highland butter is one of the things that US Customs agents are quite familiar with.  Apparently, Ethiopians visiting or returning to the States stick loads of their butter in dry ice to freeze it thoroughly, then pack it in their checked luggage.  I doubt they then waste it on their hair.